News Cut: February 9, 2009 Archive

The 'man' factor

Posted at 7:44 AM on February 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (16 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

Until I heard American Public Media's Marketplace on Friday evening, I had no idea that the economic downturn and the resulting unemployment is falling disproportionately on men.

Men make up 82 percent of the total number of people eliminated from the country's workforce and for the first time, women are poised to pass men in the majority, according to the New York Times.

"Given how stark and concentrated the job losses are among men, and that women represented a high proportion of the labor force in the beginning of this recession, women are now bearing the burden -- or the opportunity, one could say -- of being breadwinners," says Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, told the newspaper.

It is a huge societal shift with changing roles.

"Oh yeah, of course. For a while there we were calling him the man maid, because he was doing all the house work while I worked," Michelle Tully, whose husband, Stephen, is laid-off.

As recently as 2005, the unemployment rates for men and women were about equal, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only in the early '80s have they varied much.

Still, women are likely to make less money, work fewer hours, and have no benefits in their soon-to-be workplace majority.

The situation, meanwhile, is setting up an interesting political debate as Congress considers President Obama's stimulus package. If men are bearing the brunt of unemployment, should the economic stimulus favor men?

"Absent efforts to increase worker diversity in infrastructure-related jobs -- this could lead to a shift of hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from women to men," Rep. Jared Polis, D-CO. said in a letter to President Obama last month.

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Victory tour

Posted at 12:06 PM on February 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Disasters

It's rare that a big buildup to a TV news interview lives up to the hype, but Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot of US Airways flight 1549, and his crew did not disappoint on Sunday night's 60 Minutes.

The highlight of the interview was Sullenberger's assessment of what had to happen to avoid calamity.

"I needed to touch down with the wings exactly level. I needed to touch down with the nose slightly up. I needed to touch down at a descent rate that was survivable. And I needed to touch down just above our minimum flying speed but not below it. And I needed to make all these things happen simultaneously."

This is the aviation equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your belly, and this is what happens when it doesn't go right.

But after listing the things that he had to do, Sullenberger delivered the "money quote."

"I was sure I could do it."

Sullenberger and his crew visited the TV morning news shows today, and couldn't escape many of the silly questions for which the hosts are famous.

The CBS Early Show tried mightily to one-up the superior interview on 60 Minutes, by forcing "emotional" reunions between passengers and the crew.

"How important were the rescuers," was one question.

"Do you think you'll all be friends for life? Is there life before Flight 1549 and after?" host Maggie Rodriguez asked at a particularly awkward moment.

"Did you see any change in the expression on his face," Good Morning America's Diane Sawyer asked Sullenberger's co-pilot.

"I wasn't looking at his face," the co-pilot replied.

Good Morning America, scored the biggest "get" of the morning, however, and it didn't come from Sullenberger or his team. It came from a passenger's camera phone, the first image of what the January incident looked like from the wings of the downed airplane.

Later on Monday, the crew got the "keys to the city" from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

(Photo by Michael Nagle/Getty Images)

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Where good ideas go to die

Posted at 1:02 PM on February 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: The jobs we do

This video, depicting the difficulty of getting ideas around the suffocating government bureaucracy at NASA, is getting lots of traction today.

The video was produced by astronaut Andrew Thomas.

The film shows how innovation-blocking behaviors are "all too common" at the space center, according to a story on NPR's Morning Edition today.

The film was shown at a NASA retreat, seeking to find out why good ideas don't get implemented.

Question: How much different (or not) is this satire from the way ideas get considered at your workplace?

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Local Holocaust survivor's story could be a movie

Posted at 1:11 PM on February 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Henry Oertelt's story of surviving the Holocaust may be heading for the big screen, the St. Cloud Times reported in this weekend's edition. He wrote the book, "An Unbroken Chain: My Journey Through the Nazi Holocaust."

I interviewed and wrote a story about Oertelt, who lives in Little Canada, in late 2007, while he was producing podcasts of the book for KVSC, the radio station in St. Cloud.

You can listen to his podcasts here.

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A-Rod's admission

Posted at 1:59 PM on February 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Sports

Let's review the news concerning the person many believe to be the best player in baseball, and one of the best in the sport's long history.

Alex Rodriguez in 2007:

Alex Rodriguez answering the same question on February 9, 2009.

"I did take a banned substance. For that, I am very sorry and deeply regretful."

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The vanishing Somali boys

Posted at 3:51 PM on February 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice

Officials at a local mosque have scheduled a Tuesday news conference to confront growing rumors that they are helping to receuit young Somali men to fight on behalf of Islamic extremists in Somalia. The news conference comes after the Star Tribune asked -- but did not answer -- the question of the mosque's involvement in an article today.

Two weeks ago, National Public Radio reported on the disappearance of young Somalis in several U.S. cities and, like the Star Tribune, it seemed to implicate the Abubakar mosque in Minneapolis.

The most recent disappearances happened last November, on Election Day. That's when 17-year-old Burhan Hassan and six of his friends seemed to vanish. As the rest of the Somali community in the Twin Cities' Cedar-Riverside neighborhood were watching the election returns, the boys slipped away, boarded a plane and headed to Africa.

"My sister called me and said Burhan is missing," says Abdirizak Bihi, Hassan's uncle. He runs a local youth center where all the Somali kids play basketball and video games after school.

So far, officials at the mosque haven't confronted the allegations. In the Star Tribune story, a lawyer in California, said to be a consultant to the mosque, denied any connection.

"To this date, there has never been anything specific to indicate that Abubakar recruits or that anybody at Abubakar said to these young men, 'Go fight Jihad,'" said Mahir Sherif.

Dina Temple-Raston, NPR's national security correspondent, told the network's News & Notes program last week that between a dozen and 20 Somali kids have disappeared. She says nearly all of them were bright, college-bound students, brought up by single mothers near the mosque.

The FBI isn't talking, but the Christian Science Monitor says it stumbled into "an active investigation" in Atlanta last month when an FBI agent showed up at a meeting of Liberians, seeking information about missing Somali boys.

Because Somali kids were disappearing. Not in Atlanta yet, that he knew of. But "six or seven high school kids," former refugees resettled in Minnesota's Twin Cities area, the largest Somali community in the US, had recently been recruited by an extremist group through a mosque there and sent back to Somalia to train as suicide bombers.

Newsweek magazine said the FBI is concerned that the extremist group, al-Shabab (a spokesman for the group is shown below in December promising more attacks in Mogadishu) , might create "sleeper cells" in the United States.

"There is always a concern about spillover, bleed-out, call it what you will," an unnamed U.S. official tracking the case told the Los Angeles Times. "Especially if they were to return on a U.S. passport."

Sheik Abdirahman Ahmed of the mosque denied to Newsweek that any Somalia fighters have lectured at his mosque.

"No one knows for sure who recruited them," the Times quotes Abdisalam Adam, an educator who heads the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Minneapolis. "But they obviously did not wake up one morning and decide to go."

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